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In early June 1943, James Eric Swift, a pilot with the 83rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, boarded his Lancaster bomber for a night raid on Münster and disappeared. Widespread aerial bombardment was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of poems during the Second. In researching the life of his grandfather, Daniel Swift became engrossed with the connections between air war and poetry. Ostensibly a narrative of the author's search for his lost grandfather through military and civilian archives and in interviews conducted in the Netherlands, Germany, and England,Bomber County is also an examination of the relationship between the bombing campaigns of the Second World War and poetry, an investigation into the experience of bombing and being bombed, and a powerful reckoning with the morals and literature of a vanished moment.… (more)
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I have had this book for a while, I remember seeing it at the
The premise of the book is simple, if tragic. The author's grandfather, his father's father, was shot down as a bomber pilot in WWII when his son was four. The grandson sets out with his dad to find out more about the missing man. They know he was shot down over the Channel, and that his body washed up on a Dutch beach.
The process is ingenious, through archives, logs, letters, and eventually war poetry. He visits RAF reunions and cemeteries, target city libraries, taxis in a Lancaster bomber, and walks the beach (where dozens of airmen ended up) to tell a tale.
The ending is superb, bringing together Auden and Icarus in an obvious move that I wouldn't have imagined.
'I don't know who Icarus is for you. but for me he is Acting Squadron Leader James Eric Swift of 83 Squadron, Bomber Command, who fell to the sea of the coast of Holland on the morning of 12 June 1943. He was returning from bombing Munster. His given name was James, but everybody called him Eric. But that is not quite true: for really, nobody calls him anything. When I was beginning to write this book, my father and I spoke of how we might refer to him, for he did not yet have a name. Names imply a role in the ever-shifting arrangements of a family - Daddy can become Grandpa, and titles like 'your aunt' or 'my brother-in-law' make sense only at certain times - and this man's family role ended on a summer day sixty-five years ago. As Ovid reminds us: Daedalus, 'the unhappy father', was at that moment 'no longer a father.'
An earlier observation, on his grandfather crashing just before his unit took part in the firebombing of Dresden, and guilt, quoting from Orwell: 'Now no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust... [but] there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. War is by its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savage we are some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.'
Failing improvement, we owe our falling boys honesty.